On Sun, Jul 24, 2022 at 08:33:53AM -0700, Raymond Toy wrote:
> It looks like texinfo 6.8 inserts:
>
> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "
> http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
>
> at the beginning of each html file.
>
> In this day and age, shouldn't it be just <!DOCTYPE html>? Or does texinfo
> html output really need that?
This should change with the next release, <!DOCTYPE html> is now the
default.
Oh, ok. I can wait until then. Not that it really matters to me; I was just getting a warning from Chrome Lighthouse about that. As long as texinfo does the right thing here, I'm perfectly fine with it.
> I'm not a web dev but a few times I wrote web pages, my old emacs would
> insert the loose.dtd lines, and reviewers would say I shouldn't. It should
> be the simple one.
What is produced by texi2any is actually HTML 4.01 Transitional,
compatible with HTML5. My personnal view is that the old DTD has
advantages over the new <!DOCTYPE html> for various reasons:
* we know which HTML version it is. <!DOCTYPE html> (and HTML5) is
an evolving standard which is anything but practical.
Yeah, as a "living" standard, it's really hard to know what is supported. I guess you end up having to test for everything. Or hope the browser is up-to-date with the current spec version of the day.
Thanks for your comments.
* offline validation is easier. I could not find an offline validator
easy to install on a debian testing for HTML5.
(In fact, I disagree with the directions taken by the HTML standard with
HTML5, but that's probably off topic...).
Going forward we must abide to the new practices, even if they make our
life as developpers worse, since some day we will use HTML5 constructs
that are not compatible with HTML 4.01 Transitional.
--
Pat